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| Major accomplishment for Pax Olympi |
Monday evening, december 11th, Pax Olympi faced the biggest challenge in club history. The Venue? Xpert Arena. The opponent? F.C. Rapid-C.F.R. The challenge? The Major League Cup final.
An awesome season had gotten us all the way to the final and to the brink of making it into the Xpert Champions League, but everything could still go wrong. One loss and all our efforts would have been for naught. Before the match manager AemonTargaryen tried to get his players to relax, but they obviously knew this and the fear was palpable in the locker room. If they screwed up now, nobody would remember the great campain that came before, all everyone would remember was their failure. So from the moment referee Manuel Ficu blew his whistle for the first time to start the match, we played not to win, but to avoid losing...
Fortunately the first half was a rather timid affair. Rapid's Ulrich Mittag picked up an early yellow card after dangerous play and weescaped an early deficit when a powerful header by Ivan Xurxo brushed the outside of the goalpost. However, we still went into halftime deflated by a serious injury to key midfielder Ibrahim Erdal. Erdal was replaced by Julius Wheatman, who is no slouch either, but that left us with just Colin Cornfeld and Simone Robbiati on the bench, not an enviable position to be in.
Things quickly went from bad to worse in the second half. It seems our players were so happy to have escaped the first half with a draw, and they were still thinking about that accomplishment instead of paying attention to the resumption of play. This allowed Rapid's midfielder Jeffery Sharp to move towards the goal unopposed and get off an unchallenged shot on goal. Goalkeeper Mota Helton did not look good at all and just like that it was 1-0 and we were in serious trouble. You would think that would be enough of a wakeup call and now our players would start playing to their potential, but it was not. It took another dangerous shot by Ivan Xurxo before we finally got things under control. However, the managers poor tactical choices (or opposing manager Wernvall's tactical brilliance, whichever you like) meant pax Olympi couldn't get anything done offensively. It took until the 82nd minute for us to finaly register our first chance, a shot by Alexander Butko, but his attempt was easily saved by Rapid's goalkeeper Damien Steele. As time slowly ran out, it seemed we had to accept our greatest fear; failure under the bright lights of Xpert Arena. However we got one final chance in the third minute of extra time and somehow Luciano Millo got enough elevation to get off a perfect header and Damien Steele could only watch the ball sail past him into the net. Manuel Ficu blew his whistle to end the match immediately after that and somehow we had gotten ourselves 30 more minutes to deliver a performance worthy of a cup title.
The first half of extra time was a snoozefest. Neither team had the guts to go for the win, so the spectators had to watch the ball being kicked around in midfield for fifteen minutes. The second half of extra time was a whole other affair. Not because Pax Olympi suddenly played a blinder, but because of how lucky we got. Rapid got chance after chance, but somehow we managed to survive headers by Rafael Ferrón and another shot by Xurxo. The only noteworthy thing from our side? Colin Cornfeld, known for his penalty prowess, replaced star defender Gavin Crouch. So when Manuel Ficu blew his whistle in the 120th minute we were both incredibly relieved and strangely confident. With an amazing goalkeeper in Mota Helton and no less than four penalty specialists on the team, we knew we had the skills required to win the upcoming penalty shootout, no matter how undeserved that would be.
As you would expect, that's exactly what happened. All we needed was one bad kick by Rapid's Michael Engkvist to was easily handled by Mota Helton, because all five our penalty takers did what they are paid good money to do. Mota Helton himself took the final penalty kick and once the ball hit the back of the net, he was swamped by all the other players, rightfully celebrating him as the man of the match!
So, after 120 minutes and ten penalties, Pax Olympi were crowned the Season 50 Major League Cup champions and obviously I am ecstatic with the result. My thoughts go out to F.C. Rapid-C.F.R. and their manager however, because there was one team who deserved to win this cup title and it was not our team...Still, sometimes you have to get lucky on your way to greatness and as the saying goes, we won't look this gift horse in the mouth!
Obviously, playing in the Xpert Champions League next season will be a completely new experience for us, but don't expect us to be satisfied with six free matches to get more match experience. We are going to give it our all to get as far as possible! And who knows, maybe we can surprise everyone once again...
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2017-12-14 15:40
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5557 Views |
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Reporter:
Gago_94
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